Before They Were Famous: Watch Golden Globes Nominees in Early and Forgotten Performances on Netflix

Awards season is finally upon us. The Golden Globes are this Sunday, Oscar nominations are on the horizon, and while you can still catch some of the films and performances up for an award at a theater near you, many of these movies are stuck in that gone-from-the-multiplex-but-not-yet-on-Netflix limbo. Which is why we propose a more ambitious undertaking than skimming reviews and checking Rotten Tomato ratings. Below is a round-up of performances (all streaming on Netflix, btw) by this weekend’s nominees that we hope will surprise you or at least make you look twice. Find out which honored British thespian once had a bit role on Cheers and see who got their start in a National Lampoon comedy in our slideshow below.

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Years before wowing critics and fans as Queen Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett played an Australian nurse imprisoned in a Japanese war camp in this ensemble film featuring Glenn Close and Julianna Margulies.

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As Linda Lue Linden, Bullock plays the sidekick to an aspiring country singer who moves to Nashville hoping to hit it big. It’s also worth noting this is River Phoenix’s last completed film before his death at 23.

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Dame Judy has been playing period characters forever, but when you spot her as the gossipy Eleanor Lavish in Merchant-Ivory’s famous adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel, you realize how rare her late-career fame really is.

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Would you be surprised to know that the English actress had a small role in the classic American sitcom as Frasier’s first wife? Catch her comical turn in season ten, episode sixteen.

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In her first film role, when she was only nineteen, Winslet plays a teen in an obsessive friendship.

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The 12 Years a Slave protagonist was once in Woody Allen’s lighthearted Melinda and Melinda, where the same story is presented in two ways, as a comedy and as a drama.

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Another Globes nominee who first performed for the small screen, Elba once had a role as Angelo Sedaris in the crime procedural CSI: Miami.